


Seeking Uncle Wiley's Name

by busyinmymindpalace



Series: Fallen Hatchetfield [1]
Category: Black Friday - Team StarKid, Fallen London | Echo Bazaar
Genre: Blood and Gore, But kind of, Eldritch, Horror, Listen I don't pretend to make good writing decisions, PEIP - Freeform, Psychological Trauma, Seeking Mr Eaten's Name (Fallen London), Spoilers, but also not really, hunger, like not really, of a sort
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-14
Updated: 2020-06-03
Packaged: 2021-03-01 16:33:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 5,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23640130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/busyinmymindpalace/pseuds/busyinmymindpalace
Summary: His name was Wilbur Cross. He will not be again.(This is inspired by the SMEN questline in Fallen London, so expect all the body horror and other disturbing content implicit in that.)
Series: Fallen Hatchetfield [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1713100
Comments: 9
Kudos: 20





	1. Step into the Black and White

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wilbur Cross is introduced to a new fwendy-wend.

The portal sitting in PEIP’s Interdimensional Access Laboratory resembled a gaping, yawning mouth more than a hole in the fabric of space. It looked innocuous enough, but there was a kind of hunger to it Colonel Wilbur Cross couldn’t place. He decided it was down to pre-mission nerves. Everything organic they’d sent into the portal so far had come back out missing a chunk or two at best right up until the suits had been developed, and it was only natural to anthropomorphize a phenomenon like that that couldn’t otherwise be comprehended. As Cross approached the portal, his suit felt like a child’s costume. Impossibly flimsy. The glass faceplate may as well have been plastic wrap. When he stepped through it held, of course, the lab had tested the suit every damn way imaginable, but that was no comfort.

The Black and White stretched out before him. There was no depth in any direction, no horizon, no landmarks to speak of. Even the portal-mouth hardly stood out against the dark when he looked back. The floor was the only thing with substance, demarcated by a slowly moving layer of dense white fog. How could it be white, he wondered? There was no light here to reflect off of it. He could hardly see his own damn fingers in front of his face. When Wilbur reached down to touch the fog, his hand met no surface. He took a deep breath and pressed on into the dark.

After some amount of time, somewhere between twenty minutes and a day of straight walking, the dark took on a greenish tinge. The fog was still white, it was just that the void in front of Wilbur’s eyes resembled nothing so much as the light on the edge of sleep. Even green was too mild a word to describe it. It took another minute or so for him to realize it wasn’t just his brain trying to compensate for the red of the blood vessels in his eyes when he blinked. He figured it was a sign. “Hello?” he called into the not-green. “My name is Colonel Wilbur Cross of the United States Military, Special Unit PEIP.” He introduced. “Planet Earth, Milky Way Galaxy.” He added for good measure.

The fog began to reshape itself, drawing away from under his feet and into… something. Something that glowed, something that finally gave off light. He could see his hands again, or more accurately his gloves, still intact and glowing that odd, ghoulish, impossible green.

Cross had read all of Lovecraft’s work. Call of Cthulhu wasn’t strictly his favorite story in that mythos, but it was the first he’d read. The concept of an impossibly large winged, tentacled creature slumbering at the bottom of the sea was, he’d thought before, disappointing. Yog-Sothoth and Shub-Niggurath were suitably terrifying. Hell, even shoggoths were respectably hard to comprehend. Cthulhu was just a damned squid that grew wings and developed a god complex in comparison. If his young self had known what he was seeing now, he’d have eaten his words.

"A monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind." Wilbur quoted hoarsely. Those words didn’t do it justice. Oh, they were mostly accurate, but they didn’t encapsulate how the sickly green light pooled off the creature like sweat, how two sets of scales arced from its deep-set eye sockets like armor plating, how its wings were scythes of shadow, how its eyes burned with an impossibly palpable hatred, how it dwarfed him by hundreds, no, thousands, no, infinities of feet, how every time he looked at a different spot all of this _changed_ and _warped_ and took no pains whatsoever to maintain consistency with its prior shape or the flesh – was it flesh? – neighboring it, or-

“My name’s Wiggly, and you’re going to be my bestest buddy-wud.”, it said.

(When he recounted it later, nobody believed him. Of course, why would they? He’d laugh any of his fellow soldiers out of HQ if they told him an eldritch horror spoke in baby talk.)

The creature’s voice had a solidness to it that its body lacked. Its words resonated not just in Wilbur’s eardrums, but his skin and muscle. His bones rang like tuning forks. Wilbur was propelled backwards as if he’d been shot out of a cannon. The nothingness all blurred around him as he ran, not even knowing he was running, until a world he didn’t recognize blazed into light around him and the glass that had covered his face shattered against tiled floor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Behind your mirror, V names VIRIC, the colour of shallow sleep." (That's the not-green in question. In the Fallen London universe, it's a color which cannot be seen in the real world.)


	2. There are monsters that live in your head

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everything is fine now

Wilbur woke up screaming two days later in the infirmary, clothes and bedding drenched in sweat. He was dimly aware of his protégé, Major John McNamara, standing up with a start from a chair at his bedside. It still took him several long seconds to stop screaming, and even then his breath came in long, heaving pants for the next several seconds. John stayed silent during that time. Once Wilbur finally started breathing normally again, he gave John a short nod. John replied with the time and date, not that Wilbur processed it. Still, having some thread in the fabric of the universe to cling onto was reassuring, even if Wilbur was mostly positive that meant it had been a week since he’d stepped into the portal. Wilbur reached a hand to his face and felt the small cuts he figured he’d gotten when he’d crashed his way out of the portal.

“I wouldn’t recommend going in there.” Wilbur reported. Surprisingly, that got a laugh out of John, who up until that point had looked like he’d seen a ghost.

“No shit, Colonel.” John replied, grinning. Probably he figured the screaming had been a practical joke or something of the sort.

“Did I say anything after I left the Black and White?”

“Yeah, you quoted Lovecraft, talked about the color green, and said something about Drowsytown. Wasn’t sure about that last one, but you looked terrified out of your mind while you were saying it.”

“If it helps, I don’t remember anything about Drowsytown.” Wilbur admitted, brow furrowed. He reached towards a carton of apple juice some nurse must have left for when he woke up. He took a sip, and then in the blink of an eye the whole thing was gone, carton and all, and his mouth tasted like cardboard. John stared at him for several seconds after that.

“Ah… did you mean to eat that?” John asked, pointing at the place the juice carton had been. Wilbur shook his head.

“Why the hell would I intentionally eat a juice carton? I guess I just blacked out for a second.” Wilbur retorted, wiping some wet cardboard from the corner of his mouth.

The official report stated that Wilbur had gone into the Black and White, hallucinated from the lack of stimulus and some as yet unidentified intrusion of psychic energy reminiscent of H.P Lovecraft’s creations. Wilbur couldn’t bring himself to state to a panel of researchers that he had nightmares about something that called itself Wiggly. Terrifyingly, the portal remained open in the hopes that PEIP would be able to improve the suit construction and send someone else in in the near future.


	3. The Light on the Edge of Sleep Redux

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Often dreams are stranger than reality. This time, definitely.

Every time Wilbur closed his eyes, the sickly green from Drowsytown filled his vision. He always woke up terrified out of his mind, screaming and crying with no memory of his dreams whatsoever. That was the worst part. Cross had never been easily frightened by a long shot, and now fear pervaded every moment of his life, waking and sleeping.

After a week, something in his brain snapped. When he went to bed that night the green was still there, and so was the fear, but both were background noise. Something shaped like a man with a tentacled face and angry, burning eyes sat at a table in a void. There was an empty chair across from him. Wilbur took a seat. The horrifying creature across the table smiled, tentacles fanning out over an invisible mouth. “Colonel Crossy-Woss, how are we supposed to be fwendy-wends if you run away whenever I try to talk to you? That’s not very polite.” It said in a halting, irregular voice. Wilbur somehow managed to breathe through it all. Eventually, he extended a shaking hand across the table. “Hello, Wiggly. It’s nice to meet you again. You can call me Wilbur.”

Wiggly shook it.

When Cross woke up, his stomach growled like it never had before. Wilbur made eggs and toast. He ate those, then made some bacon and ate that too. Then oatmeal, then cereal, then, he dimly realized, a steak he’d been defrosting for dinner, still raw, then –

When the phone rang, raw meat juices were dripping down his chin and he was still hungry. Not only that, his kitchen was a mess. He picked up his phone.

“Hey Wil, it’s John. General Cardini says you’re cleared to return to duty.” John’s voice said faintly on the other end of the line.

“Ah, hey John, right down to business as always. I’ll be in shortly.” Wilbur replied, more invigorated than he’d been at any point in his life up until then.


	4. Chrysalis

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A warning

Things went back to something like normal after that. Wilbur started guiding John through the process of getting promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, never mind that John had a habit of ascending through the ranks fast enough to give them all whiplash with or without Wilbur’s help. In a way, that was part of the fun. They’d been joking for years now that John had better not outrank Wilbur too quickly or it’d make him look bad, but in reality, Wilbur had always had a gut feeling that John would replace him faster than any of them ever could have expected. Rank was secondary, besides.

In Wilbur’s dreams, Wiggly called to him. At least, he assumed as much. Unlike that strange first meeting, he never actually remembered anything. He just woke up with his hands aching and glyphs scrawled into his headboard or nonsensical images flashing through his brain. Every time he tried to remember his first encounter with Wiggly, more details sprang to life. Drowsytown had a shape to it. A geography. If he really focused on the area behind Wiggly in that memory, he could see other human shapes, as if they’d always been there even though he remembered remembering only darkness in his past recollections. He’d read once that every time a person recalled a memory, the memory broke down a little and changed. Maybe this was that, him projecting his fears onto the other side of the portal.

“You’re fast approaching the self-development domain, kid.” Cross said one day, eating lunch with John in the mess hall. John looked up through a mouthful of… whatever the hell they were eating. Cross had stopped noticing the taste of anything anymore by then. Anything he could eat was fair game.

“I’m only five years younger than you, old man.” John retorted. “You wouldn’t be quoting stages of mentorship at me unless you had a reason, and I doubt the student is finally surpassing the teacher just yet.” He added, eyes narrowed in transparent concern.

“Yeah, and don’t you forget it.” Wilbur chuckled half-heartedly, staring at his now empty plate as if it had personally insulted him. There was silence for a few seconds. “He’s going to come through that portal and reshape the world as we know it. His slumber is no longer dreamless, Johnny.” He said very seriously, leaning across the table.

John blinked a few times, mouth agape, brows furrowed, not at all sure how to respond. “Secret fourth stage of mentorship?” he blurted back, hoping to lighten the mood.

A shrill, hysterical laugh escaped Wilbur’s lips for far longer than was reasonable. He leaned further across the table, muscles tense. “No, Major McNamara, this is beyond that. You didn’t see – in the portal, when he –“ he said, trying to explain that primal fear without actually mentioning the name Wiggly, which still felt like a fucking fever dream in and of itself. “Everything you hold dear is going to go up in smoke right in front of your eyes, get it? You’d better be ready to face something like that, or I haven’t done my job. I don’t have long _to_ do my job either.” he said, snapping his fingers in John’s face.

John stood from the table, tense and focused, having slipped into a fighting stance without even realizing it. “Colonel, I’m getting the distinct feeling that you haven’t recovered.” John said firmly, faintly aware that people were watching.

The words were like a smack in the face. Wilbur looked around at the not-so-subtle eyes of his colleagues and stood too, free of whatever miasma had descended on his brain in that moment. “Jesus, John, I don’t know what that was.” He muttered, running a hand through his slicked-back hair. “I meant to say you’re getting promoted soon to just one rank below me and, you know. Not much further to go.” He backtracked awkwardly, letting out a nervous chuckle. All of a sudden, the bags under his eyes felt palpable and conspicuous, like two billboards plastered on his face labeled “SOMETHING IS WRONG HERE.” He rubbed his eyes quickly as if to wipe them away. “John, I’m sorry, I haven’t been sleeping. Shit.” He rambled on. He took a deep breath and looked at his mentee, horrified at himself.

That night, he dreamt again. In his dream, he saw John as he’d been eight years prior crawl into a chrysalis. John aged in a time lapse, hair growing, small wrinkles forming, muscles changing shape a bit, and then as all pupae do dissolving into a goop. Just as the transparent surface started to become obscured by two orange and black wings, a green tentacle came out of the void and crushed the chrysalis in one sharp, abrupt gesture. When Wilbur awoke, his face was wet. He put a hand up, fully expecting to find blood, and realized he’d cried himself awake. Then he doubled over, coughing with such ferocity he half expected to burst a lung from the effort. After what must have been twenty minutes, he spit something onto his pillow, surrounded by tiny aerosolized droplets of blood. Not able to tell what it was at first, Wilbur turned on his bedside lamp and picked up the strange object, holding it under the light.

In his palm, a monarch butterfly streaked with fungal green unfurled, stood, and flew through his open window. Wilbur collapsed back on his bed in a dead faint.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the world of Fallen London, there's a realm of dreams called Parabola. It's a physical place that people can get lost in that can to some degree affect the real world, though notably it Is-Not and so has trouble affecting the real world since it defies the laws of nature. In this fic, I'm considering Parabola an extension of the Black and White.


	5. A dream of dark waters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey skies, black oceans, and incarnadine scars. Time marches on.

The world had lost its vibrance like an old shirt that had gone through the laundry too many times. It was soft around the edges, washed out, and less real than any of Wilbur’s dreams. The monotony broke from time to time, though not too often. A flash of green in some apples, the dark unctuous red of fresh meat, that kind of thing. After someone had commented on mismatched gloves, one dark brown and one dark grey evidently, Wilbur found himself wearing the few garments he was pretty sure he remembered the color of over and over again. Hard to go wrong with PEIP’s black uniform or in his day to day life, regular denim. At the same time, his dreams of the Black and White became more and more real day in and day out. Wilbur was starting to look forward to nighttime. The swirling fog almost painfully sharp against the endless black, the pulsing verdant light of Wiggly’s ever-distant form, hell, even the horrifying peach-red-white that came with the endless visions of people ripping one another apart in his dreams were preferable to the static grey of everyday life.

One night in particular he dreamt of a vast ocean. It was a kind of dark blue-beyond-blue, beyond navy, beyond velvet, beyond any kind of color he’d seen before. The crests of the ocean’s waves were a near-luminous cerulean in comparison. He stood on its shores and gazed down until his eyes burned. Something crimson bobbed in the waves inches from the shore, a beacon in the dark, and Wilbur grabbed it without hesitation. He stared at it for a few moments, but like all things in dreams it rippled and shifted and refused to coalesce into anything meaningful. In his hands it felt… moist? Roundish? As his fingers stretched and contorted and unspooled themselves, Wilbur knew he wouldn’t have much longer to figure it out. He brought the red thing to his mouth and bit into it.

When Wilbur woke up, his mouth tasted like wax and mud and salt. His hands were pruny and wet and – no, that wasn’t from the ocean, he’d sweated through his pajamas again. His left arm stung like a bitch for some reason or another. When he looked down, there was a deep, irregular, ragged, crescent-shaped wound there. Evidently, he’d bitten himself hard enough to draw blood and somehow hadn’t woken up in the process. He brushed his fingers over the wound and felt nothing. He could feel the skin around it just fine, but apart from the light stinging the wound itself was just numb. Wilbur got out of bed, bandaged it up, and got ready for the day.


	6. Bulls-eye

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which McNamara becomes increasingly aware that something is incredibly wrong. In which Wilbur becomes aware that there's only one way to make things right.

“You’d think at a certain point the higher ups would say ‘Yep, you’ve got it, you can shoot now. No need to keep testing you.’” The newly promoted Major McNamara complained from the other end of the shooting range.

“You’d think at a certain point they’d tell bodybuilders ‘Yeah, that’s perfect, you can put the weights down and never pick ‘em up again.’” Wilbur retorted back half-heartedly. “Remember the incident with the dolphin and the gorilla last week? I sure as hell wouldn’t want my aim to be off when facing down something like that.” He recalled.

John put his handgun down and walked over to Wilbur. He stared at the target sheet and noticed a tight, neat cluster of bullet holes right near the bulls-eye, which was just about par for the course for any PEIP agent. Next he noticed the soaked through bandage on Wilbur’s arm. “Jesus Christ, what happened to you?”

Wilbur looked down and saw that his once white bandage was now (to him) entirely dark grey. “I thought that would have scabbed over by now.” He said, walking over to the nearby first aid kit. “I got a nasty scrape in my sleep somehow.”

“If someone beheaded you I think you’d call it a mild pain in the neck, Colonel.” John commented, voice tinged with concern. Wilbur started unraveling the bandage to replace it with a fresh one, revealing the still open, still sluggishly bleeding wound from the previous night. “ _Christ._ ” John repeated, staring at it. “How do you get that in your sleep?”

Wilbur clenched his jaw as he re-bandaged the wound, then crossed his arms to hide it. “I had a dream about eating something, and the something turned out to be me, John, is that what you want to hear?”

“I can’t actually think of anything I’d _want_ to hear right now.” John admitted. “Remember Operation Sunstone?” John asked with a bit too much sympathy in his voice for Wilbur’s liking.

“Possession by an entity that claimed to be Earth’s sun, yes. Half our squadron went stark raving mad until the solstice passed, I remember. What does that have to do with a scratch?” Wilbur recounted swiftly, taking the target down.

“You told me that day: “Johnny, protocol be damned, always be ready to look your superiors in the eye and tell them when their judgement is flawed. Hierarchy is for smaller and simpler worlds than ours.” John recited, shaking a hand with a finger pointed upwards in a dramatic imitation of what Wilbur had said that day.

“Don’t tell me, my judgement is flawed.” Wilbur replied sarcastically. “Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re not under attack right now.”

“We aren’t, you are. All the signs are there. Withdrawal from social situations, changes in appetite, unexplained injuries, erratic speech, changes in dress, fixation on a particular cause or event-“

“Not very progressive of you to call PTSD an interdimensional attack.”

“I didn’t say shit about it being interdimensional, sir.” John said firmly. Wilbur had no response to that for several seconds, realizing that he’d given himself away.

“I shook hands with him once, just once, in what I thought was a nightmare. Face your demons, you know? I guess it was really him.” Wilbur admitted softly, taking a seat on a nearby bench. “The nightmares didn’t stop like I thought. They’ve gotten worse. I’ve seen more death in sleep than I ever have awake.” He continued, shaking his head slightly. “I saw you crushed seconds before you were ready to fly. I ate what I’m almost sure was my own heart. I saw people tearing one another apart with their bare hands.” He went on, slouching until his head was in his hands.

John looked around to make sure the range was empty, ever vigilant of keeping Wilbur’s reputation intact, and took a seat next to him. “We can tell the access lab to close the portal. Keep whatever you saw from coming through.” He suggested very practically, hand on his chin in thought.

Wilbur laughed at that. “Doors open from both sides.” He replied. He swallowed thickly and leaned back against the wall. “Everyone puts so much store in material things. Things you can build or buy. They don’t mean anything, they’re just this… thing we fixate on to pretend we can affect our reality in any meaningful way.” He commented.

“The portal got us this far. The material got you somewhere… immaterial, I suppose. Illusory or not, gratuitous or not, it’s something to work off of.” John mused.

“I don’t know what would happen if you closed that door. I left some part of me behind in that dimension between dimensions.” Wilbur thought aloud. “Maybe I’ll go back. See if I can find it.” He suggested.

John squinted at him, not sure if he was serious or not. “As I recall, you said you wouldn’t recommend going back. That was right after you screamed at the wall for ten seconds straight and right before you ate a juice carton, cardboard and all.” He said, almost annoyed now. “I’m not an expert on this kind of situation, but I get the feeling if you go back, best case scenario your mind will snap.”

Wilbur stared into space for a few seconds, then suddenly became aware he was smiling. No, not smiling, more grinning so widely he felt the corners of his lips might crack open. “That’d be a sight.” He said dreamily.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In Fallen London, part of the sequence of Seeking Mr. Eaten's name is acquiring seven weeping scars, seven stains on your soul, and seven memories of chains. This is how I imagine a weeping scar would behave irl. Similarly, in Fallen London the sun is sentient and controls the laws that shape reality, which is where the idea for Operation Sunstone came from.


	7. Memories of chains

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dreams of drowning and betrayal.

Six more nights passed, each one leaving him with another wound that refused to scab over. They got harder and harder to hide. There was the one on his arm, yes, but that could be covered by a sleeve easily enough. Then a second joined it. A third on the opposite arm. A fourth deep gash rather than a bite at the base of his ribcage, slanting up along the line of the ribs. A fifth slashed up his side like he was a fish in the middle of being gutted. A sixth on his left calf. The seventh was when it really became an issue, as it rested at the very top of his collarbone and slanted towards his neck in a way that peeked out of his shirt every once in a while. If John noticed later that day, he didn’t say anything about it. Come to think of it, John hadn’t actually been working with him as much. He’d been branching out more. Working with other senior agents. Doing a little training of his own. If not for how dangerous and unfamiliar the world now seemed, Wilbur would have been overjoyed. Instead, he felt spiteful. All that effort and John abandoned him in his hour of need? Disloyal bastard.

As he had the same dream as the first over and over again, he tried to get a look at the thing in the water, but it never worked. Finally, on the seventh night, his dream took him under the waves. He couldn’t see anything but the pitch darkness of dreamless sleep, but he was aware and thinking, so he knew he must be dreaming. The water pressed down on him with an incredible amount of force. He felt his skin had to be on the verge of sloughing off. Water poured into his nostrils, between his clenched teeth, even bursting through his eardrums. He knew he had to swim towards the surface, but he could hardly move his arms against the pressure of the water. Every movement just cast him further downwards. The dream seemingly stretched out for days, maybe years, with him never reaching the bottom. When Wilbur awoke he had the word “BETRAYER” on his lips and a palmful of some kind of green fur.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kinda rushing through the other six Weeping Scars because I want to take this story somewhere. This is largely filler.


	8. I'm not one to ever pray for mercy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a portal remains open and I name PEIP's general at the time after the inventor of Caesar salad.

_One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six-_

“The desk has had enough.” General Cardini said from the doorway.

Wilbur looked down at the pocket knife in his hand, then at the forty-eight pockmarks clustered in the wood of his desk, then up at the General’s face. It had lines in it he didn’t remember. Whether they’d been etched by age or emotion was hard to tell, given the time frame. Her hair, Wilbur remembered, was red with streaks of grey, or had been. Now all he could see was grey tucked into that impossibly tight bun. Miracle she had any wrinkles at all, given that to Wilbur’s eyes her hair was pulling at her skin enough to rip it away from her skull at any moment. Maybe it was that new desaturation that made her look unspeakably old. He didn’t stand, speak, or otherwise acknowledge her further. _Seven._

“At ease.” She said sarcastically, pulling the knife out of the desk, folding it, and placing it in her pocket. “Major McNamara was right, something is still wrong with you.” She observed, taking a seat without waiting for an invitation.

“Major McNamara has been told as I’ll tell you now that that’s not a very nice way to talk about PTSD.” Wilbur replied flatly, glaring. “Major McNamara needs to learn to mind his own business instead of mine.” He added, leaning over the desk.

She leaned forward, undeterred, palms flat on the wood. “Major McNamara has a duty to report a potential safety risk, as all of us do.” She retorted. Wilbur thought back to that morning. Betrayer. Green fabric. He looked down at the cluster of stab marks again. It looked like something familiar. Something-

A hand came in front of his face and snapped its fingers. Right. Cardini again. She hadn’t stopped talking after all. “I’m talking to you. Did you know you’re bleeding through your shirt?” she said, gesturing at a wet patch that could easily have been water to the unobservant.

Wilbur looked at her, attentive now that they were talking about something that mattered. “He did.” He confirmed, leaning forward to match her stance. Dimly, he realized the old him would never have done something like that. The thought vanished as quickly as if it had arrived. “If it takes a scratch or two for me to see into his mind, so be it.”

Cardini pulled out a file folder. “The creature was shaped like man with an octopus head and a mouth obscured by tentacles. Its height, width, and depth are impossible to determine, as it did not appear to have any coherent relationship with the human conception of how a thing should occupy space. There was no consistency past those key features. It was a green-beyond-green, as odd as that sounds on paper. As far as I know, my mind couldn’t process it, though I have my suspicions this creature sent me out of the portal through some as yet undefined power.” She read before placing it down on the desk. “Seems about as friendly as Lovecraft was tolerant of other races and cultures.” She commented.

“He wants to be my fwendy-wend.” Wilbur said, leaning back, eyes towards the ceiling as he visualized that towering figure again, that creature who seemed to become more comprehensible with each dream he had.

Cardini pinched the bridge of her nose. “Let’s take a moment and pretend I didn’t just hear those words come out of your mouth.” She proposed. “Are you voluntarily allowing this entity to communicate with you?”

“Not at first, but he was very compelling.” Wilbur admitted. “You want to know if it’s safe to go back in the portal or if my brain’s too fried to allow it.” He suggested, smiling.

“You’ve hit the nail on the head I’m afraid.” Cardini admitted. “There’s a lot of good we could do with safe access to that kind of technology. It could mean a revolution in the way we approach altercations with interdimensional entities. I’ll be honest, I’m willing to risk a nightmare or two per participant, but if this has gone beyond that, that’s several million we’ve wasted on the Interdimensional Access Lab with only a few disintegrated and discombobulated volunteers to show for it.”

“You didn’t tell me it was something important, here I thought you were concerned for my well-being.” Wilbur replied, twirling his knife. He could have sworn Cardini had taken it, and she seemed surprised too to see it in his hands. She went to check her pocket, and appeared to come up with nothing, not that her expression changed to reflect that. “The more I think about what I saw in there, the more I want to go back. All the things I feared that day have lost their sharp edges. If I saw the entity now, things would be different. I’m sure of it.” He said honestly. Never mind the waking world had dulled to match.

Cardini mulled this over for a few moments. “Don’t extend your stabbing to people and we might be able to see that through.” She offered with a barely suppressed eagerness, standing and leaving the room.

In hindsight, Wilbur had no idea how the conversation had turned so quickly. It hardly made sense to begin with. At best he’d just mirrored what Cardini was saying, and how had he gotten his knife back? If he didn’t know better, he’d say something was nudging Cardini’s mind in a direction it wouldn’t ordinarily go. Something was helping him along.

That night he woke up from a dream about floating in a black abyss to a stabbing pain in his hand. A sewing needle was embedded deep, deep in the fleshy part of his left palm, already threaded. A spool of thread colored a familiar green-beyond-green rested in his hand next to it. It took several minutes to pry the thin needle out of his hand, as it was stuck firmly in a bone. Hard to say which one, as he knew just about jack about the bones of the hand, but he knew it hurt like hell. When he finally yanked it out the tip was slick with blood and a small chunk of marrow stayed stuck on the end. He rested it beside the fabric from the previous night and lay awake for the rest of the night. If he stayed still long enough, he could swear he saw a pair of eyes in the corner of his vision. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a sec. Sorry! I had a chapter half-written and got distracted.


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